Okay, I was too hasty in my intemperate berating of the Washington Post here. Although they totally deserved it, because they were too hasty first! I’m referring, of course, to the uproar over Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s bomb in his underwear attempt to blow up Flight 253 from Amsterdam. In its initial coverage, the Post made not the slightest mention of the fact that Abdulmutallab’s “plan” was very unlikely to damage anyone but himself. Today the Post acknowledges that Abdulmutallab “is not a seasoned al-Qaeda operator but a disturbed young man whom the group tried to use as cannon fodder.”
The Post’s editorial provides much-needed fanny protection for the Obama Administration from the electrodes to the testicles crowd, led, of course, by Mr. Electrodes to the Testicles, Dick Cheney. The Post points out that the Obama Administration is handling Abdulmutallab’s case in exactly the same manner as the Bush Administration handled a near-identical case, involving failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid, something that Mr. Cheney, in his hysterical attempt to make political hay over the incident, has conveniently forgotten.
Even better, the Post goes on to say that “the Bush administration’s own experience has showed that holding suspects as enemy combatants [as Cheney demanded] creates more problems than it solves, because of the lack of due process and legal accountability. Unfortunately, the Post also insists that we need a “national security court to govern presidential decisions to detain those who are too dangerous to release but against whom there is insufficient evidence to hold under federal criminal statutes”—so that we can legally deprive people of all of their rights, locking them up forever without a shred of real evidence whenever we find it convenient to do so.
It is a sad—make that a deeply humiliating—commentary on the state of these United States, that the Obama Administration, whose devotion to civil liberties is moderate in the extreme, has to be defended from the Torture Now! crowd by the Oh, Only a Little Bit of Torture crowd. In these hard times, we have to take what comfort we can.
